Jessica Rothe, the Scream Queen Who Stopped Trying to Leave Horror

Jessica Rothe

Photo: MTV International / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	May 28, 1987 Denver, Colorado, United States
Occupation	Actress
Known for	La La Land, Happy Death Day, Forever My Girl

Jessica Rothe has died on screen more often than most actors get cast. In Happy Death Day a killer in a grinning baby-face mask murdered her, she woke in the same borrowed dorm bed, and he murdered her again, and that loop turned a supporting player from independent film into the face Universal and Blumhouse sold to multiplex audiences. The label that followed, scream queen, fit the box office and missed most of what she had trained for. She came up through ballet and a conservatory degree, took a small part in a Damien Chazelle musical, and spent the years after her breakthrough chasing romantic leads. Now she has a full slate of horror films behind her and a third Happy Death Day whose story, she says, she and Christopher Landon have already broken. The open question is whether the drawer Hollywood put her in is a trap, or the one room where she gets to carry a film.

She grew up Jessica Ann Rothenberg in Denver, Colorado, the daughter of Susan and Steve Rothenberg, a pediatric surgeon. The stage ran in the family: her paternal grandmother, Colleen Rothenberg, acted in the theatre. Rothe started ballet at eight, spent summers at theatre camps in Kansas City, went through Cherry Creek High School and took a bachelor of fine arts at Boston University.

Rothe, born on May 28, 1987, finished that degree in 2009, and the first years after it were an apprenticeship served under her birth name. There were minor appearances on The Onion News Network and supporting roles in independent films such as The Hot Flashes and Jack, Jules, Esther & Me. Her stage debut came in 2011, in David West Read’s play The Dream of the Burning Boy, and Charles Isherwood of The New York Times called her performance impressive. By 2015 she was leading small films like Lily & Kat and the Netflix science-fiction pilot Parallels, and she was cast as Alexis in Chazelle’s La La Land, a role she wanted because as a child she thought a world where anyone might burst into song would be the dreamiest place to live. Her first series lead followed on MTV: Paige in Mary + Jane, a cannabis comedy produced by Snoop Dogg that lasted one season. Daniel Fienberg of The Hollywood Reporter found the show forced and her rapport with co-star Scout Durwood entirely natural.

The loop that made her

Christopher Landon’s Happy Death Day opened in 2017 with Rothe as Theresa “Tree” Gelbman, a sorority sister cruel enough that the film has to earn every ounce of sympathy, condemned to relive her birthday until she unmasks her own killer. The nickname was deliberate: trees grow, and the script wanted a slasher heroine who changes from one person into another. The film became a significant box-office success and the reviews landed squarely on her. Brian Tallerico at RogerEbert.com wrote that her performance was easily the best thing about the movie; Jeannette Catsoulis of The New York Times called her unimprovable.

She hesitated over Happy Death Day 2U, worried that a sequel would simply retread the first film. Landon’s pitch changed her mind, a follow-up that picks up where the original ends and turns the premise into science fiction, and the 2019 release repeated the commercial result. Kimber Myers of the Los Angeles Times called her one of the most magnetic new actresses on screen. Both films earned her Fright Meter Award nominations.

The harder story is what happened between and after the loops. Forever My Girl, a 2018 romance she accepted for its themes of strength, was poorly reviewed. In 2020 she led Valley Girl, a jukebox-musical remake of the 1983 film, and the romantic drama All My Life; critics praised her and little else. When action finally called with Boy Kills World, where she replaced Samara Weaving as the helmeted enforcer June27, Lauren Coates of The A.V. Club wrote that the character entered too late, that the helmet stood in for a personality, and that the result was a grievous waste of a charming young talent. The pattern is uncomfortable. The genre that made her has, so far, written her the only parts that hold their shape, while the prestige-adjacent scripts collapse around her and the bigger action role hides her face. Scream queen describes where the good material came from. It says nothing about her range.

Television offered steadier work without a defining role. She appeared in Gillian Flynn’s Utopia for Amazon Prime Video, then played opposite Melissa Leo in the rehab-fraud drama Body Brokers. Netflix cast her as the young Sarah, the heroine’s mother, in flashbacks for the sixth season of Virgin River, and brought her back in the seventh. In 2025 she played Cass Himmelstein, the senior ER nurse holding a Miami trauma ward together, in Netflix’s medical drama Pulse, which was cancelled after one season.

A year inside the genre

What Rothe did next reads like a decision. In 2026 she premiered or released five genre films. Imposters, Caleb Phillips’ science-fiction horror film, opened at SXSW in March, with Rothe as a mother who finds a way to rescue her abducted baby and Charlie Barnett as the husband who comes to suspect the infant is not their son. Affection, BT Meza’s first feature, reached theaters in May; she plays Ellie, a woman whose seizures erase her memory of the husband and daughter around her, and the critical consensus credited the film’s lasting impression to her lead performance, even as RogerEbert.com argued it blurred its own domestic-abuse theme. At Fantastic Fest she played Iris, the wife whose death sends Scott Mescudi up a mountain in Adam Egypt Mortimer’s Pathetic Fallacy, and Alli, an American on a medical mission in the Amazon, in Mike P. Nelson’s giant-snake picture Beware Boiúna, which opened in US theaters at the start of October. In September, Toronto’s Midnight Madness section premiered River, Joshua Giuliano’s debut, with Rothe and Jane Levy as estranged siblings stranded on a remote river with a faceless killer in the woods.

Off screen, she announced her engagement to the actor Eric Clem on Valentine’s Day 2019, and they married on September 12, 2020, in Morrison, Colorado.

Universal releases River in US theaters on January 15, 2027. The third Happy Death Day, developed under the working title Happy Death Day to Us, is still waiting on a greenlight from Universal and Blumhouse, and a Virgin River prequel built around Sarah and Everett, with Callum Kerr, remains in development at Netflix. If Tree Gelbman wakes up one more time, she will find an actress who stopped trying to leave the genre and started using it.

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Tags: actors, actresses, Jessica Rothe, Boy Kills World, Christopher Landon, Happy Death Day

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